Woman on the Edge of Time
Feb. 2nd, 2022 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearWoman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy is a novel from the 1970s about a woman named Connie, who is unjustly committed to a mental institution and starts receiving visits from Luciente, who claims to be from the future. Luciente has the power to transport Connie's spirit into her future, as well as visiting her in her time, so Connie gets the opportunity to see what life could be like, while also fighting for her own survival within a corrupt mental healthcare system.
This book is more a treatise on the oppression of women and people of colour in the 1970s, and a discussion of what's wrong with broader society and how we could perhaps approach things differently, than it is a story. It uses the traditional trope of viewing our society through the eyes of someone from another time, to raise issues about inequality, poverty, discrimination and corruption of power. These are all powerfully addressed, with a lot of discussion about potential futures and where humanity might be headed - but it's very dense in places, with not much in the way of plot.
I did get invested in Connie's fate, and was engaged by her as a character, but I definitely felt more connected to the sections in the 1970s present than to those set in the far future. I did, however, think the presentation of the way language might have altered in the future was very cleverly done, with those characters using a consistent and interesting set of colloquialisms.
The whole thing was relentlessly depressing and pretty grim, though, showing horrific mistreatment of and disrespect towards the patients in the psychiatric hospital, which I do realise was very much the point. I did like the fact that the book never categorically determined whether or not Connie's visions of the future were real, or just part of her potential psychosis.
A bit tough to get through for multiple reasons, but an interesting picture of one author's view of her time.
This book is more a treatise on the oppression of women and people of colour in the 1970s, and a discussion of what's wrong with broader society and how we could perhaps approach things differently, than it is a story. It uses the traditional trope of viewing our society through the eyes of someone from another time, to raise issues about inequality, poverty, discrimination and corruption of power. These are all powerfully addressed, with a lot of discussion about potential futures and where humanity might be headed - but it's very dense in places, with not much in the way of plot.
I did get invested in Connie's fate, and was engaged by her as a character, but I definitely felt more connected to the sections in the 1970s present than to those set in the far future. I did, however, think the presentation of the way language might have altered in the future was very cleverly done, with those characters using a consistent and interesting set of colloquialisms.
The whole thing was relentlessly depressing and pretty grim, though, showing horrific mistreatment of and disrespect towards the patients in the psychiatric hospital, which I do realise was very much the point. I did like the fact that the book never categorically determined whether or not Connie's visions of the future were real, or just part of her potential psychosis.
A bit tough to get through for multiple reasons, but an interesting picture of one author's view of her time.
